There is a comment addressing this and mentioning that (as far as I understood) there could be excess hydrate that is part of the natural crystallization process. Also he could get the reaction wrong and it's large crystals of a different molecule.
I just find it hard to believe that a renown lab specialzing in highly explosive compounds had this stuff explode when turning on the spectrometer, but he could hit it with a hammer.
I don't assume malice on either part, so the best explanation for me is that they were testing different things.
Given that he did it using a different synthesis using public shop grade starting materials in his garage and having no equipment to really verify his intermidiates and final compound it also seems likely. Also this is not addressed in the video. The video is popular/humorous science and not research afterall.
I'm actually a bit baffled that this video is taken at face value as disproving the labs original publication. But I also can't put the 1.5 Joule part in relation and a spectrometer creates more force than a soft hit from a hammer?
He addresses the disproval part: he didn't disprove their paper. He stated that just because it's below their threshold for sensitively doesn't mean it's super ultra mega sensitive, it just means that it's highly sensitive. 1.5 Joules is more than you think: a hammer tap could easily be less than that (lift a 100g weight a 1.5 meters off the floor: that's 1.5J of potential energy), however, as he puts it, that's still "sensitive as dicks". As for it blowing up in the mass spectrometer, that can happen if it started to decompose over time, accidental friction, accidental x-ray activation, too much in one spot, etc. I'm sure if he worked with the substance more than once or twice it's possible he'd have a random detonation or two. The paper and this video easily exist cooperatively rather than adversarially, and I think he was more calling out the science popularizers which exaggerated claims about it. In fact, he does nothing but mention things from the paper as being accurate.
